2 14 Thomas Henry Huxley 



sentences and of sentences into paragraphs, which may 

 be designated as the architectural work, and, finally, 

 the ideas conveyed, that is to say, the actual object of 

 the writing. 



Huxley was a wide and omnivorous reader, and so 

 had an unusually large fund of words at his disposal. 

 His writings abound with quotations and allusions 

 taken from the best English authors, and he had a 

 profound and practical belief in the advantage to be 

 gained from the reading of English. " If a man," he 

 wrote, "cannot get literary culture out of his Bible, 

 and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and 

 Hobbes, and Bishop Berkeley, to mention only a few 

 of our illustrious writers— I say, if he cannot get it out 

 of these writers, he cannot get it out of anything." 

 He had at least a fair knowledge of Greek in the 

 original, and a very wide acquaintance with Greek 

 phrasing and Greek ideas derived from a study of 

 Greek authors in English versions. He had an unusual 

 knowledge of Latin, both of the classical writers and 

 of the early Church fathers and mediaeval writers on 

 science and metaphysics. French and German, the 

 two foreign languages which are a necessary part of 

 the mental equipment of an English-speaking man of 

 science, were familiar to him. Finally, he had of neces- 

 sity the wide and varied vocabulary of the natural and 

 technical sciences at his disposal. From these varied 

 sources, Huxley had a fund of words, a store of the 

 raw material for expressing ideas, very much greater 

 and more varied than that in the possession of most 

 writers. You will find in his writings abundant and 

 omnipresent evidence of the enormous wealth of verbal 

 material ready for the ideas he wished to set forth : a 

 Greek phrase, a German phrase, a Latin or French 



